Army’s New Approach: Strategy-from-Scratch for Hybrid Threats

The Pentagon is boosting ground forces to better prepare for “hybrid” enemies that combine small-unit, insurgent tactics with high-tech weaponry. Think Hezbollah fire teams ambushing Israeli tanks with sophisticated, armor-piercing rockets. “High-performing small units are now a national imperative, capable of operating independently at increasingly lower echelons,” Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis said in June. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just announced the Army will add more than 20,000 troops, for at least three years, to bolster these units.

It’s not just the infantry units themselves getting reinforced. The Army is also revamping the procedures that commanders use to make decisions on how their units will be used. It’s a quiet, under-reported revolution, propelled by an alphabet soup of obscure Pentagon institutions referencing little-known academic theoreticians. But the thrust is all too real: How do you teach commanders to identify the real roots of a problem, amid the noise, chaos and distracting politics of today’s “irregular” conflicts?

The Army’s solution is something called “Design.” “Design is an approach to critical and creative thinking that enables a commander to understand unique situations, to visualize and describe how to shape positive change across the operational environment,” the Army’s Website explains. Contrast this to the Army’s traditional “Military Decision-Making Process,” which relies on well-oiled reactions to a certain, small set of problems. Say an enemy tank column is headed for your ally’s capital. MDMP would have you figure out the enemy’s weak spots, and maneuver to hit them with the right weapons.

Design, on the other hand, is meant to help commanders tackle less clear-cut problems. Let’s say Country X’s government has collapsed after years of instability, and now there’s rioting, drug-running and bloody sectarian squabbling on the streets — the kind of societal collapse that has a bad habit of spreading across borders. (For an example, see the overlapping conflicts in Chad, Darfur, South Sudan and Central African Republic, which one Army intel officer characterized as a Mad Max-style “Thunderdome.”) In that kind of situation, it’s not always clear what caused the problem, or how to deal with it. MDMP isn’t equipped for handling so many unknowns. Rather than trying to squeeze the square peg of Country X’s rioters, drug runners and tribal militaimen, into the round hole of a theoretical tank battalion, Design asks commanders to conceptualize a brand-new strategy, from scratch. Simply put, you’ve got to think outside your old, dog-eared field manual.

If sounds to you like an overly verbose description of a very basic idea, you’re not alone. “This is not a new way doing things,” Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the Army’s intellectual establishment at Ft. Leavenworth, told Danger Room. “All great leaders have always thought this way.” The Army just wants to get it into writing. Caldwell is overseeing the writing of a new field manual, FM 5-0, that includes a chapter on Design.

Design is about commanders “spending time figuring out what the problem is they’re really trying to solve,” rather than simply “jumping in trying to solve” the problem they’re most comfortable with. That kind of sober yet creative command is exactly what the U.S. military needs, in this age of hybrid, irregular threats.